July 4, 2004

Fahrenheit 4/09

As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel — not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.

Michael Moore, in producing F911, has taken facts (not under dispute) and presented them in a manner that bolsters his opinion about the Bush administration, the rationale for the war and the prosecution of the war. He didn’t stage soldiers. He didn’t stage Bush doing this or that. Yet he’s been harshly criticized as a propagandist by such wankers right-wingnut activists as Move America Forward.

You have the choice to see Moore’s film, or not to see it, and you’ve got reviewers to tell you a little bit about the film before you decide. The events of April 9th, 2003 which were staged for your viewing pleasure and then reported as news on every TV station (and, incidentally, funded by taxpayer money which could have been spent making the world safer) were foisted upon you without your choice. As long as you were trying to stay at all informed, you saw that propaganda thanks to an eager media.

Do you think all those people outraged at Moore’s admitted op-ed piece will rise up and criticize our administration for its efforts to feed us a line of bull?

Don’t hold your breath. And every time you hear someone criticize someone like Moore for expressing an honest, heartfelt opinion by presenting you with facts, think about how some people have had to manufacture their “facts.”